


scattered scraps of sunlight still shine

by cuddlydreamsonrainydays



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe, F/F, High School, Hurt/Comfort, Summer, both of them have issues, but nothing is very explicit, these girls deserved better than canon so i gave them hope
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-26
Updated: 2018-02-26
Packaged: 2019-03-24 08:33:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,738
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13807476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuddlydreamsonrainydays/pseuds/cuddlydreamsonrainydays
Summary: The stars watch as they set each other's universe right.Set in New Zealand at the end of the summer holidays. Nights are warm and the scent of freedom tangles with the salty air just by the ocean.





	scattered scraps of sunlight still shine

Sweat runs down Claire's back, almost electrifying in how cool it is against her burning skin. She feels the hot pavement melt away at the soles of her shoes, even though she only touches them to it every few metres. The air that she charges through on her skateboard is solid, and stuffed with the sweltering heat of January. Her hair is in salty tangles behind her, bleached by two months of blaring summer sun. It's dry and broken against her shoulders where they aren't covered by her tank top. She's far from the only one outside, although she does appear to be the only one moving. The entire world stands still. Even the children have calmed down, ten days before the start of term, and here, getting further away from the harbour and closer to Bayview, no-one is out in the ocean. Its surface is a mirror, a perfect picture of calm, but the drift underneath doesn't halt just because it's summer, and everyone is seeking relief from the heat.

She races along the soft curves of the walkway. Heavy bass pounds into her left ear, only her left ear, and she curses Mannie for the third time. Fucking cunt stepped on her right earbud when he stumbled around her and Leilani, dripping with salt water. She should honestly be glad that he didn't step on her face. Jody would have a right fit if she came home with a broken nose or just a black eye. Claire is prepared for a stern glance at her tangle of hair, and her revealing tank top that honestly started out as a revolution against her hyper-religious stepdad and is now merely practical, because her clothes are black but black fabric on her skin doesn't lessen the heat, and prepared for a furrow of Jody's eyebrows when she smells the residue of the weed that Leilani and Brandon were smoking and that she herself purposely abstained from.

Claire was supposed to be home at six. It is now ten past six, and she'll consider it punctual, although she's still five minutes from home, and in the heat, she has no motivation to skate any faster. Even though she's at fifty metres at most from the ocean, there's not the slightest hint of a breeze in the air.  
The new freak isn't supposed to be arriving until seven, anyways. Kaia, her name is, Kaia Nieves. She's eighteen. That's about all of the sparse knowledge Claire snagged from a glance at the file on the kitchen table before Jody closed it with one of her more threatening stares. Claire knows she means well, and that even if she didn't, Claire deserves the way Jody scolds her sometimes.

She might officially be an adult, but she lives under Jody's roof, and eats Jody's food, and although she knows Castiel has upped Jody's pay as a police officer a great deal since Claire moved in with her, she's grateful. She really is. Jody is the best parent she's ever had, and she used to be happy in her family. Jody just gets it, and all the things she criticizes openly and doesn't just sigh at, like a low-cut tank top, are things that have an actual, real possibility of killing Claire. So. She's fine when Jody minds if she comes home and her breath is laden with the scent of beer and other, more dangerous kinds of fun. She's fine when Jody minds if it's two, sometimes three hours past curfew and Claire hasn't called. Most of the time, she texts. Jody is a police officer, after all, and when Claire is at the beach with friends, drinking and smoking and sitting around a fire, she doesn't want to be picked up in a police car. Not that Jody doesn't know what they're doing, but they have an arrangement that guarantees Claire and her friends safety from the law as long as they stay safe from the drifts, cliffs and cars on the main roads.

She hasn't even had a single beer this time, although she is legally allowed to drink. Jody asked her to be sober, and contrary to popular belief, Claire is responsible. She's not a total fucking jerk, at the very least.

Her back is drenched with sweat when she gets home, and the bridge of her nose feels burned. Her white as skin will get her in serious troubles eventually. She's not going to think about the new school she's starting it, the one where fifty percent of students are Maori. At Sacred Heart, almost everyone was white. Pakeha. Almost everyone lived on the hill, and many of her classmates had been to Europe and scoffed at some of the fanciest architecture in New Zealand.

Jody is too busy fussing about dinner, which was supposed to be a Sunday roast on Saturday, but is now apparently salad and fish that she was offered from some colleague who goes fishing every Saturday without fail, to even notice she's late. She barely acknowledges her arrival, even though she doesn't bother to be quiet, kicking her shoes off at the sliding door to the living room - and afterwards neatly putting them in a corner - and cracking her back twice while she waits for her eyes to adjust to the relative dark of the inside.

Claire only catches a snippet of her conversation with Alex as she walks past, something about how the colleague, Kevin - although Claire calls him Boaty McBoat totally has a crush on her, and Jody, as she does every week, acting like this is absolutely far-fetched. It's not. Alex doesn't say things that are far-fetched.

Claire doesn't get to her room before she strips out of her tank top and shorts. She's about to let them drop to the floor, right by the door, when she notices the acute state of cleanliness her room is in, and the soft smell of a perfume that is decidedly not hers. In summer, her perfume is nothing but saltwater and an abundance of sunscreen. Right. This isn't her room anymore. Not just hers, anyway.

She places the sweat-soaked clothes in the laundry basket, where they belong. Her eyes flicker to the queen size bed in the middle of her room, which is as perfectly made as it hasn't been since Claire's first sleepless night in 407 Main North Road, and to her built-in closet. It is open, and Jody has yet again rearranged her clothing. Half of the closet is a sea of black. The other half is empty. Empty as the notion of Kaia Nieves, this girl she knows nothing about. The girl who is going to share her space.

The water of the shower won't go cold, although she lets it run for at least three minutes, waiting. Lukewarm as it is, it doesn't do anything to wash off the day at the beach, although the sunscreen and the sand sticking to her toes are gone by the time she wraps a pastel pink towel around herself. She doesn't bother with her hair, and leaves it in tangles that still have a hint of salt to them. Bleached by the sun as they are, they are a pain to brush, and she doesn't like them lush. She's no picture-perfect blonde.

Her skin is still damp, but she throws on fresh underwear anyways and a t-shirt that leaves her shoulder bare. Her legs are slightly red. For a moment, she amuses herself by pressing her hands into them, one second, five, eleven, and then watching the white fingerprints slowly fade away.

Her phone buzzes in her bag. It's a message from Leilani on Messenger, saying she coaxed a promise of new earphones for Claire out of Mannie once he'd had one to many hits from a joint, and Claire snorts before she falls into the rabbit hole of snapchat stories. Some of the people she could consider her friends, but doesn't for the sake of definitely not ever crashing at their house after a party, not ever, appear to be doing a haka in a state in which they're definitely not intimidating anyone. They look ridiculous. She messages a friend who put the spectacle in her story to please, send her the saved version of it, and then goes on to check on Layla, who definitely runs with the wrong crowd, and by this Claire means her own crowd, and whose parents regrettably still have the power to ground her. Layla is seventeen, and moans about it, but Claire can tell she's fine, and she belongs to the lucky ones. She belongs to those who still have two parents, one of them a teacher and the other one something Claire isn't sure of, but is definitely respectable, to those whose parents still ground them and mean well as they do so. 

Claire is still in underwear and her Dad's faded t-shirt when a truck drives up to the house, and Jody calls for her.

"Shit," she breathes, and pulls on the first pair of shorts she can grab from the not-so-messy mess of her closet.

"Coming!" she yells.

Her damp feet have left footprints on the turquoise carpet. She hopes the darkened stains will dry before Kaia gets the chance to take a closer look at this space they are going to share, and then tells herself that she doesn't fucking care. Kaia is going to live with them, and who once moves to Jody Mills' house needs to be a major fool to leave. Which Kaia might be. Claire knows nothing about her, except that, supposedly, her life can't have been particularly easy.

Jody smiles at her when she walks into the living room. Claire doesn't feel particularly smiled-at, but that's okay, since Jody gives her enough attention, more than she's ever asked for and just as much as she needs, and Alex is on her other side. Together, they step out through the sliding door, and make sure to close it before the stuffy heat sweeps into the pleasantly cool air of the house. They're assembling a small army, one of wayward girls with a new-found mother. Claire feels like she belongs.

She's had a conversation about this with Jody, one that involved three tears, two from Jody, one from her; it ended in a hug and the reassurance that even though Claire will have to share her physical space, she won't have to share her space in Jody's heart. Claire hadn't known that she needed that reassurance, but it sits solidly in her ribcage now and it keeps her lungs moving steadily. It is only logical for Claire to share her room, anyways. Her room is bigger, and Alex works crazy shifts that would annoy anyone out of her space in less than a month.

It isn't a mere feeling of belonging. It is the knowledge, too, and the latter helps far more. Claire isn't one to trust her heart in important matters. Or any matters. Her thoughts, though. She has control over those most of the time.

Her control is blown to bits, to minuscule grains of sand, and blown away in a non-existent hurricane, the very second the passenger door of the truck opens and a girl steps out. Her head is bowed, eyes cast downwards, but Claire doesn't need to see her face to be thunderstruck. The heat was sweltering before, but now it is suffocating. She's wearing denim dungarees, and a striped long-sleeved shirt, and it takes Claire a moment to connect her posture and this outfit that doesn't seem to go with this picture. Something about Kaia Nieves doesn't match up, doesn't add up in her mind. This is a puzzle in which no two pieces fit, Claire thinks, and then Kaia looks up and their eyes meet and everything slips into place.

The clothes don't matter anymore, nothing matters anymore.

The universe spins around them, and it will wait for them.

Claire manages to give a smile. She watches Kaia's lips curl up so hesitantly that she wonders if this is a smile, or merely an instinct, a reflex, a curtesy. Already, her clothes feel like they're drenched in sweat again, although she stands completely frozen, and the sun has finally dipped low enough so that shade envelopes them. The heat lingers, but the peculiar heat Claire feels would be the same in the middle of July. Then Kaia's gaze flickers on to meet Jody's, no double take, and Alex's, no double take either, but Claire doesn't budge. Not by a millimetre. She's being boiled alive.

Jody's fingers brush her arm before she steps forward to greet Kaia and the man from the Home for Troubled Youth who has brought her here. It has to be intentional. Claire works to relax her stiff muscles, her back, her arms, her thighs, and the residue of heavy bass in her ears fades away when she shakes her head, and finally steps forward.

Kaia has a bag in hand now. It is small, so small that the clothes inside won't possibly fill up her half of the closet, and her fingers are clasped tight around it. Claire recognizes the strain in them, the white of her knuckles. This bag is all the girl in front of her owns.

Something white-hot flashes through Claire. A blush creeps up her cheeks at the fierce intensity of it. Its unlike the mellow dizziness she pays more than a few bucks to feel on the regular, unlike the way a high lifts her away from all the ragged, hard edges of life. She's on the edge of something now. It's not quite the familiar anger that has been bugging her for something like twenty months. It's more intense, more frightening. It doesn't beg to be unleashed.

"Well," she says to Kaia, and there couldn't have been a way to make herself look less eloquent, less prepared for the situation, less unworthy of whatever this thing is that now holds her in a grip that transcends the firm grasp summer and its carelessness have on her. She sticks out her hand. "Welcome."  
Kaia shakes it, and Claire implodes at the way their palms linger against each other's for a heartbeat too long.

The government worker's harsh voice doesn't break them apart, they would have had to let go anyways, but it does pull Claire back to reality, and it makes the white-hot knife tear through again. Only it doesn't feel like this knife is going to leave any more marks on her scarred body. It doesn't actually feel like a knife.

It's protectiveness, she realizes when she watches Kaia swallow, and give another one of those uncertain smiles. She's never felt protective before, and she isn't sure yet if it hurts.

Her heart goes tumbling down into her stomach, and her stomach drops down to her feet, into the ground, to the other side of the damn world, like Britain or something, when it occurs to her that all this heat may only erupt into a deadly thunderstorm if she fails to protect Kaia. When, her mind amends with a bitterness that isn't foreign at all. It's worse than strong black coffee, worse than any of the alcohol they buy in accordance with the principle of 'the cheapest booze with the highest percentage of actual alcohol in it'. This is when the knife is going to leave scars.

She's known this stranger for all of twenty seconds, and she's already screwed. Claire wishes she'd gotten pissed at the beach now. These edges aren't any of the ones she's learnt to either avoid or ignore when they pierce the soft flesh at her sides, where a razor has pierced it just as many times.

"Let me take your bag," she manages. "I'll put it in our room."

Our room rolls of her tongue with such ease that Jody, who's been talking to the government dude, whips her head around.

Claire can only shrug.

"Thank you," Kaia says. "I'd rather-"

"It's okay," Claire rushes. "You can-"

This is the moment Kaia presses the bag into her still outstretched hands. Her smile tells a story of conspiracies Claire apparently is now in on, although she yet needs to figure out what exactly she's in on, and, further, what exactly she's managed to get herself into. She's not sure how she managed to make the girl trust her. She'll take it, though. She holds on to the bag tightly, determined not to let anything happen to it, although it's a stupid instinct. This seems more dangerous than any of the drifts under the calm surface of the ocean, more dangerous than swimming at the beach by Marine Parade drunk at night, and Claire was five, or maybe ten metres from the water when she watched one of her best friends run into it to and never resurface last summer. Mal was the best swimmer out of all of them. It didn't hit her until some of the girls who'd stayed sober, at least two of them pregnant, started screaming. Everything went frantic, then. Jody showed up. Claire was grounded for three weeks, only allowed to leave the house for the funeral. It was the only time she left her bed for something other than going to the bathroom. Now, she turns to step back into the house.

The air inside is like ice water on her skin.

Alex bumps her hip into hers in the kitchen, a smirk on her face that still betrays her incredulity. She eyes the bag in Claire's hands.

"Claire," she says. "Are you still in there? Did someone possess you?"

"You watch too many creepy series," Claire retorts, although that isn't true. Claire is the one who'll stay up until dawn watching horror movies and conspiracy theories. It's not like she can sleep, or has anything better to do. Alex, meanwhile, usually sits in the living room with Jody on the rare occasion they both have a night off, and they watch some talk show or cooking show or quiz show, anything to distract from the harsh reality of shifts at the hospital and the police station. They have this entire thing going on, homemade dessert and TV-watching. Claire doesn't envy them. She knows she could join. But she gets restless at night, and she doesn't want to.

Alex snorts.

"Yeah, nah," she says. "But you did do well out there."

Claire feels like a child who just got an injection and is now being praised by the nurse. It happens with Alex. She means well. Claire shrugs it off. The noise of her bare feet hitting the floor in the hallway seems too loud.

The bag makes no dent in the mattress when she places it on there. Claire forces herself to look away before a fucking bag on her bed makes her emotional. She doesn't do that. She doesn't do emotions. They only screw everything up.

"Claire!" Jody calls from the living room. She jolts. The truck drives off, tires squeaking. Kaia is here now. This is official.

"Yeah?"

"Will you show Kaia around?"

And it's going to be trouble. A smirk forms on Claire's lips. Trouble might be the only thing she actually, truly knows. Only, she realizes when Kaia isn't in the living room, as she expected, but right in front of her door, their door, she is used to keeping the trouble out of Jody's house. Out of her safe space, at least by day. By night, shadows grow deeper as sleep doesn't come, and she lies awake. From now on, her sleepless nights will be populated by sheets rustling when they come in contact with another body, by the steady breathing of another person. Kaia will share this bed with her.

Claire swallows hard. Trouble is trouble, she tells herself. Trouble is an art, the art of risk, and she is an artist.

 

〜

 

Claire has spoken 47 words by the time it is eleven pm, and they're in bed. She has attempted 58, if unfinished sentences were to have been finished. Over a million words must have passed through her time in herds out of order, in tangles not even saltwater could have accomplished, words that carbonated her head, her entire body. Some of them made her dizzy. Some of them, she didn't even dare think. Kaia has said fifteen. Only five of those were meant for Claire. One was a 'thanks' directed at Alex. Claire isn't quite sure what made her count.

The window is open, now that the some of the stuffy heat has evaporated into a starry night, but still, it is hot.  
If Claire were alone, she'd sleep in her underwear, maybe not even that. She isn't, though, and almost painfully aware of the shape of Kaia next to her. The t-shirt and shorts she's got on make her feel constricted, too warm. Kaia's sleeves are long, and though the fabric of her pants is thin, they reach down to her ankles. She must be suffocating.

Neither one of the girls is asleep. It is far too early, Claire tells herself, but that's only maybe a third of the truth. She won't be asleep in a few hours, either. Her body misses the buzz of three, sometimes four cans of beer, a bad habit she's formed over the course of the summer and the months of uselessness even before that. Her brain misses mindless scrolling through social media that is over a twelve hours behind, in America. She can convince herself that somewhere in the world, it is okay to be awake when she sees Snapchat stories of random people's breakfasts and watched the uploads of some European conspiracy theories that come at three, at four a.m. in New Zealand time, the second they come out. Nothing is there to distract her now from the restlessness in her veins, her heart, her lungs. Nothing is there to slow down her train of nonsensical thoughts. They're strings of words and strings of melodies and strings of memories so tightly interwoven that she can't distinguish between any of them.

Kaia's breathing is not even. It forms an inscrutable pattern, and trying to decipher it only adds to the mess in Claire's brain.

Fuck it, she thinks, and they're the first clear words in an hour of noisy silence.

She turns around.

She's faced with Kaia's back. The girl has shrugged off her blanket, just like Claire has. From the side, she looks vulnerable.

Claire wants to be closer to her. It's not entirely a selfish instinct, like the one that made her kiss Layla that one time, or the one that had her glued to Mal before, well. Before. There's some selfish part to it. She hasn't suddenly become the saint her parents used to want to make of her, when they dragged her to church every Sunday and Youth Group every Wednesday and enrolled her in Sacred Heart of all fucking schools Napier has to offer. She wants to be closer to Kaia to ease the turmoil in her own mind, to get a spark of that connection again, a spark of a universe in which everything is in its rightful place, and she won't deny it. She'd never known how addicting the feeling of 'right' can be. So far, she's been known to relish 'wrong'. Now, she wants to lose and find herself in Kaia, which is totally, absolutely selfish since she doesn't even know what Kaia has been through, doesn't fucking know anything about this girl. A second string tugs at her though, and threatens to tear her apart. It pulls with painful intensity every time Kaia's breath hitches in her throat the slightest bit.

"So," Claire says. Which, again, isn't super eloquent. She scrapes the bottom end of an Achieved in English though, so what did she really expect.

Kaia's breathing stops. Claire is doing a fantastic job.

"Can't sleep?" she asks, desperate to make amends. She can feel the drift under her feet, like she thought she was on the beach and instead of warm sand burning her bare feet, suddenly they're being pulled downwards by masses of unpredictable water.

"No," Kaia says. Her voice is muffled. The mattress moves ever so slightly when Claire shifts. And then it moves again when Kaia turns around.  
Her fingers are twisted into her long sleeves. It is dark, but Claire's window, their window, goes out to the garden, and Jody's fairy lights never go out during the night out there. So Claire watches Kaia's inscrutable expression, watches the frantic movement of her hidden fingers, watches, watches, watches. Kaia watches her right back.

"You aren't sleeping, either," she finally says.

"No," Claire admits. "I don't sleep a lot."

"Me neither."

Again, Kaia smiles, and Claire is in on all the secrets of the universe. She can't translate them into words, can't translate all this sudden knowledge into something she'll remember once Kaia stops looking at her, into something she can hold on to, something she can make her own gospel of, but she's in on everything for a few breathless moments. It's on the edge of enough.

A breeze has picked up at some point between sunset and this moment. It's just short of midnight. When Claire licks her lips, she tastes a trace of salt in the air.  
The silence grows too heavy to bear. Claire wants to know more about Kaia, more things that are words and facts and stories she can repeat over and over in her head until they become truth. Maybe her religious education has left something with her, after all. She doubts that Castiel would be particularly pleased if she rewrote the bible as a lesbian love story. She's tempted to do so only to piss him off before she remembers her atrocious grades in English. Just because she won't write them down doesn't mean she isn't craving the truth, though.

"Kaia Nieves," Claire says. The name feels like half of the truth just by itself. "What brought you here to us?" To me?

It's a personal question, but then, anything but personal questions would feel like blasphemy in a summer night. Claire's friends are probably still at the beach, probably caught up in some drinking game or another, where all was truth but no truth really mattered. None of them had anything to hide, any dignity to protect, any future or pristine image of a past at stake. Here she is, sober, with a pretty girl in her bed, in the middle of a dark blue night. She barely feels restless.

Kaia's gaze flies up to the ceiling.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"That's okay," Claire hears herself say. "We all have our secrets."

"Why are you here?" Kaia asks.

"Father killed himself when a new guy took over, Mother went mad, you know how it goes. New guy is a religious asshead and charmed my parents right in their church-loving minds, and now he wants to fix things with me, but honestly, he can be desperate all he wants. My relationship with my parents wasn't good, but it was something. Got into more trouble, got kicked out of school, all that crap. Here I am."

Kaia looks at her again, and although her words were a mess of oversharing, it feels like she's achieved something. It feels like an Excellent when the left corner of Kaia's mouth curls upward in a little, dangerous smirk.

"They picked me up drugged out of my mind outside the Warehouse when I was fifteen," she says. "Went to the hospital, then rehab, than that shitty home they put me in, and then decided my scars were too permanent to be fixed by instant oatmeal for breakfast every day, apparently."

"I got scars, too," Claire whispers.

"Mine are all over," Kaia says. She fidgets with the hem of her shirt. Claire imagines she knows, now, why the girl wears long sleeves to bed even though it's clearly too hot for anything clothes at all.

"That why you don't sleep?" Claire asks.

"Nightmares." Kaia shrugs, grins. It's bitter.

Claire wants to hold her. I'll protect you, she almost says. Three more words to bite back.

"What do you say we get out of here?" is the question that slips past her slightly opened lips instead. It hangs there, in the air. The window is open. The beach is only two hundred metres away. "We'll be gone and back before Jody notices. And even if she did, don't worry. She won't kick you out. She gets it."

She gets the restlessness that takes possession of Claire every night. She gets nightmares, and troubles. She wouldn't have bothered to take in all these troubled girls if it were otherwise. She's held Claire far too many nights for the girl to deny how genuinely Jody cares. There are no conditions to her affection.

"I don't know."

"I'll go, in any case," Claire says. She's gambling with an empty wallet and high stakes.

"If you go, I'll come with you," Kaia murmurs.

Claire turns around before the other girl can see her smile. It feels like her face is going to split. It also feels like this may be too easy. She doesn't know what she's been handed, but she's fairly sure she can't handle it. Trouble, her mind repeats. Trouble, trouble, trouble.

"Sweet as," she says, already getting up to put a bra on again, and maybe a t-shirt doesn't have holes all over. "Let's go."

She climbs out of the window with easy movements that come from having done it more times than she can count. Technically, she could probably walk out through the front door, if she were to be sneaky enough, but there's more exhilaration to an escape she knows isn't really risky if she climbs out. It's stupid, and childish, and just the petty type of thing her parents always used to lecture her about. Her parents are gone, though, and it's another way not to turn out like them, too. The window offers access to different worlds.

Kaia follows almost as easily. Her eyes dart around the dimly lit garden. Claire watches, then waves her over.

"Come on," she says. "We won't go far today. There's barely an area to Napier that's safer than fucking Bayview."

"Fucking Bayview," Kaia repeats, and raises an eyebrow at her.

"Yeah," Claire says, but it sounds too soft even in her own ears. "It's, like, boring. Town is ages away. And I'm supposed to go to school even further away this year. I can't wait for term to start."

She bites her lip. Fuck. Her voice is laced with the familiar sarcasm again that she normally relies on, but it sounds wrong, half-whispered into the summer night like this, with only Kaia to hear. What is she supposed to do, if keeping her guard up means keeping her weapons sharp?

Kaia giggles.

"I see," she says.

Claire is reluctant to call it a success, but Kaia's giggle does make her renew her plan to create an entire new religion, a gospel and a holy book.

"Yeah," she says, eloquently. She can't talk without a weapon on her tongue.

They round the house. Claire grabs her skateboard from its spot just beside the porch. They jump over the fence, Claire first, Kaia second, but like she's been doing this her entire life, and then they're on Main North Road with not a soul in sight.

"You are kind of right, though. It's a little-" Kaia hesitates. "Dead."

Claire laughs.

"Kaia Nieves," she says. Honestly, she should not be saying this girl's name again and again, but the two times it has now slipped from her mouth make up the tiniest fraction of the about of times it has flashed through her mind, and even that hasn't worn out yet. It's like her neurons created an entirely new pathway for the way the sound, the feeling of it crashes through her in waves, synapses rewired and axons changed. It's only been a few hours, and she fears she'll never get Kaia out of her system again, not even when she inevitably fucks it up, like she fucks up everything. Most importantly, she fucks up happiness, and the bubbles that float through her carbonated heart feel oddly golden. They shine in front of a charred background. She has to physically pull herself together before she can trust her mouth and tongue again to shape innocent words. "How do you like the ocean?"

"I like it?" Kaia cocks her head at her, curls bouncing as she stands illuminated only by the streetlamp they're under at that very moment. Her smile is cautious, but then, Claire could really do with some caution that goes beyond sticking to the most meagre version of Jody's rules in a way that is almost pious, and her most basic instinct to survive.

Kaia is one who knows how survival works. It's blatantly visible in her stance, always leaning slightly forward, always prepared to get her guard up. Claire sees it when sparks of lost light catch in her dark, flickering eyes as she scans the blue shadows around them.

"Good," Claire says. She clutches her skateboard a little tighter.

"Do you like the ocean?"

The question hits her unexpectedly.

"Yeah," she says. It's more human than most people nowadays. She itches to say something that isn't as lame, something that might break through the impenetrable walls Kaia has around those parts that Claire aches to know about, those secrets whispered only into the devil's hour in deep blue summer nights, but words rarely agree with her. They agree with her even less when she cares. She really shouldn't care. Like, ever. It's one of her principles with her friends. Not because she can't imagine to wholly love them, to cherish them, like all friends love each other in YA novels written by adults who romanticize their High School Years; she can. They're great, and they get her. They're her people. But two of her girl friends are pregnant, and only about half of them go to school, and Mal fucking died last year because they got too drunk and someone had used their paycheck to buy too much weed. None of them can even remember if it was a dare that made him run into the ocean that night, at a part of the beach where everyone knows swimming is dangerous, everyone has a cousin who has a cousin who used to know someone who died swimming there, or if it was mere teenage recklessness. Mal had just been kicked out, and no-one's even sure if it was because of the joint he was smoking when his father burst into the garden house he lived in, or the half-naked boy he was smoking it with. None of them remember, and it fucks Claire up. Once they found his body, he was barely recognizable. The last image she has of him is a boy with bloodshot eyes and a lighter in hand, begging her to kiss him. Then, some of the boys are gunning to be in gangs, and some of the girls, too, apparently, and although Claire tries to stay out of it, those are her people, and she's there if they talk to her. She doesn't turn her back.

She only turns that side of her heart towards them that has armour on.

It's saltwater waves that always try to find their way through. And steel rusts.

"It's pretty, but it's also dangerous as," she settles when, a minute and a dangerous thought spiral later, Kaia still hasn't said another word and her eyes have strayed from Claire's face.

She has every right to look away, of course. Claire doesn't want her to, though.

She's pretty sure her Dad died in the ocean. Walked in and never bothered to swim. Drowned, the coward he was. They never found his body, or if they did, they never did tell her. But she has an inkling that the ocean knows. And she isn't fucking Moana. The ocean doesn't speak to her, or present her the distorted corpse of her father in a friendly wave. It's not like that. There's merely an eerie feeling to the ocean that wasn't there before all this crap happened, when she used to go swimming in Pandora Pond every weekend. It was easy as to walk to down there from the Hill, too. And her Mum would take her walks, up to the look-out, all the time. The ocean stretches far, and back then, it was only pretty.

Claire can't blame all of the unease that echoes through her when she looks at the ocean now on growing up, and on realizing that there's more to pretty than the surface betrays.

It's pretty, but dangerous. Like you, her mind adds. She bites her lip, and is thankful for the lipbalm she used earlier when she comes close to drawing blood.

Kaia looks at her.

"It is," she says.

Claire wonders what her history with the ocean is. She doesn't ask.

They cross the deserted train tracks silently that stretch between the lesser and the better row of Bayview houses. Behind the grassy, overgrown tracks that are always littered with empty bottles of beer and shards of glass, houses stand taller with pride as they overlook the beach. Some of them have a second storey, which isn't the wisest considering the danger of both earthquakes and subsequent tsunamis this near to the coast, but the people who live here don't fear an existence with nothing to base it on but the very clothes you're wearing. Claire hasn't grown up to do so, either. She grew up on the hill, after all. Her friends used to jokingly call her Sacred, for her pretentious school and pretentious parents and pretentious use of words, but they don't anymore. Nothing's sacred when you spend your nights at the beach with a bottle in hand no matter what day of the week it is.

Claire stands on her skateboard when they reach the cul-de-sac that is the last bit of pavement before the sandy path down to the beach through small fields of withered flowers.

She does a few turns around Kaia, just to do something, just to move. The restlessness makes her joints ache.

The noise of her wheels rumbling across the pavement that still carries the last residue of a day's worth of sun is just below the level which might elicit complaints from neighbours, from people who own the fancier houses around here, and who are either asleep by now to watch the sunrise in the morning - some of them do so while going on a run, and Claire has met a fair few on the walkway when she was coming back from a night at one of the beaches closer to town with her friends, skating into the rising sun as the alcohol slowly leaves her system - or who are sitting in their living rooms, staring out at the sliver of moonlight on the water, and sipping red wine. It's a loud noise in her ears. It's nothing to them. A troublemaker in the streets. The blonde, picture-perfect charity case from next door. The daughter of the church official who killed himself.

Claire spreads her arms wide, and manages another circle around Kaia, who giggles and spins on the spot.  
For a brief moment, they're the only ones moving while the universe stops.

Then, Claire tucks her skateboard back under her arm. The sign that indicates the beach, and of course makes sure to advertise the dangers swimming there holds, is unreadable in the dark. They rush past it, walking fast now for no reason, in a frenzy that comes with the universe trying to make up for two skipped heartbeats.

Adrenaline pumps through Claire's veins when her hand brushes Kaias as they stumble out into the sea stones that look black in the lack of light. Trouble, trouble, trouble, her brain intones in a dissonant choir.

She isn't sure who flinches away, not even sure if one of them flinches away. They drift apart, though. By centimetres. Claire feels each of them as acutely as though the air were charged with pure electricity.

She's unsure of what to say. She only knows there are worlds inside of her that beg to be fixed by Kaia's glance.

She's never wanted to be so thoroughly seen.

She enjoys a good game of secrets any day. Or any night, rather. Days simply don't have the same appeal to them, not when sunlight might evaporate the frailer and frailest of the secrets held deep inside into shards smaller than the smallest particles. Nights hold secrets in the infinite folds of a velvety blue. This is different, though, to any game of truth or dare she's ever participated in, any conversation she's ever had with any of her friends, even the best ones, even back when caring was a thing and so were horse stickers on homework. She hasn't ever wanted to turn herself inside out in the company of another person. It scares her. In the night, there are no meandering noises and paths around her that her eyes and thoughts could follow to dilute the fear. It swipes through her, never parried, and leaves a barren jungle behind.

The sea lies black in front of them. The moon is only a sliver of its normal size, frail as the secrets begging to get out. Its light is a weak line of silver on the ocean with its waves too small to break.

Eternally the water on this planet moves, but in this moment, its movement against the edge of the stone beach is barely audible.

Claire hears Kaia's breathing when she listens. And she does.

In her mind, the beach hasn't been silent for a while. It hasn't been this free of blemishes, of empty glass bottles and metal cans and plastic wrappers for a long time. The beach is her heart. Always on the edge of danger. Always crowded with litter and voices and people, so crowded that it feels no need and no desire to keep who passes by. Always made of stone.

Even sand is only an accumulated miniature mountain range. Here, at Napier's beaches, the stones are bigger, big enough to throw one by one. Some are big enough to stand on, others sharp enough to slice right through the soles of bare feet.

The silence is vaster than the space moonlight can never reach.

Kaia is a statue. And Claire, for a skipped beat of her erratic heart, no longer carries the beach in her ribcage. She is one of its stones.  
She is terrified. It hasn't ever bothered her, or even occurred to her, that stones cannot scream.

Her gaze flickers to the right, and the magic snaps in half, in quarters, in eighths, until it becomes bearable again. Napier's lights are visible from here. She can see the port, with all its towering machinery, and the more brightly lit Ahuriri houses. Saturday nights don't fall victim to a forgotten childhood's slumber. The freedom pocketed in the folds of a Saturday night, each Saturday night, is extendable to respectable people.

The light dilutes her petrified armour enough for her to move, to think again without the searing pain of slamming into unforgiving prison walls with every thought so thoughtlessly uttered by her mind.

She breathes.

An echo of cigarette smell pours into her nostrils, although no smoke curls through the air the envelops the two of them.

She's desperate to talk.

"So," she begins, and then stumbles. She hasn't thought any further than this. The word, small as it lingers in the cold between them, no heavier than a feather, might break the ocean apart, might break the planet apart. They float on two halves of a puzzle and it's too big to know for sure if the halves will fit together again, or if each has lost too much mass.

"So," Kaia repeats.

The cold evaporates. The warmth that floats back in smells of lemons.

"Let's talk insomnia," Claire proposes. It is a threadbare suggestion made of desperation and lifted of the stove while it was still underdone. The heavy banality of it helps, though. It helps tear her mind away from the people six, eight, ten kilometres of coast to the right of her, people with fires lit and cans of cheap beer shoved between the stones. It helps tear her mind away from the gap in itself that frequent intoxication has left, the feeling that there is a cure for all the uneasiness and tension tearing through the familiar patterns of neurons below her skin still mildly burned. It is neither a particularly cunning move, nor enough to turn off the ache of not being quite enough in her.

Sometimes she wonders if they were her hands on the spade that dug all these holes. Sometimes she wonders if those invisible blisters on her fingers are necessary when the punishment for her stupidity is the porous feel of her inner organs, her lungs leaking her into her bloodstream and her skin letting out until she deflates like a rubber boat with holes.

Kaia works with the holes. She steps forward without a stumble to betray the guard she never let down. Claire can see its dim glow in the air between. She can feel the strong current that runs through it. Impenetrable not by its force, but by the sheer swiftness of its movement. Any particle trying to get through would get blown into outer space.

Claire thinks she might be quite happy to try, even if it might mean that her atoms will end up floating around in space, not even clustered into cells. More trash in the vast stretch of universe, where useless is no insult because to be useful is impossible.

"Insomnia," Kaia says. It's not a question.

"Yeah." Claire follows. They drift closer to the line where some stones glisten in pale moonlight, dampened by the shadow of a wave long scattered and forgotten. "Why don't you sleep?"

"Nightmares." Kaia's guard spikes, a solar flare that has Claire momentarily blinded to the way it crumbles a little, gives in for the briefest breathless fraction of a second. Afterwards, she assures herself that she imagined the way Kaia's shoulders hitched upwards, and her fingers twitched to form fists.

Her skateboard is heavy in her hand.

The silence is the end of the universe with only dead stars still floating around, so unimaginably distant to each other that a small human brain couldn't make constellations from them anymore, couldn't make them fit a manmade order that would promise a comfort these particles no longer yield.

Claire attempts a new big bang, but all her energy pulled together elicits no more than a whisper soon to fade.

It is peaceful, in a twisted way.

"That sucks," she says. "So you don't want to sleep?"

"I used to do everything not to go to that place," Kaia says. She's looking out at the ocean as she speaks. Claire can only see her profile, barely illuminated, so she looks out at the ocean, too. It is enough for her to be allowed to listen to Kaia. It feels like a privilege; it is standing in a museum behind a thick red cord, admiring the artwork you cannot put in danger by merely existing in the same space as it does. It puts a distance between them that lets Claire breathe in the cooling salty air, and breathe out some of her worries. She gets to listen, and it proves more trust than Claire deserves.

Kaia pauses.

Claire looks up at the stars, at the finite infinity of those she can spot with the naked eye. Here, where lights are turned of late at night and houses are small, there are more visible ones than when she used to stargaze from her garden up on the hill, but the difference is infinitesimal. She cannot presume to know either number. They may well be the same.

The Southern Cross beams down at them.

"They did make sure I wasn't a drug addict anymore before they decided to have me stay with Jody." Kaia's bitter laugh cuts through the dark, a knife with a sharp diamond edge. Each one of her words falls into place like a star, scattered in a cosmic order that somehow makes sense to Claire's brain. "The only drug that keeps me awake now is the fear of that place. How about you?"

Claire shifts, restless limbs always immune to solemnity. It's a beach, not a church service, but she feels more holy than she has since she was about five and decided that rules weren't her thing, and neither were those white dresses her mother adored and her father loved for the innocence they painted on his daughter. It shouldn't have been necessary to paint innocence on a girl aged five with big white markers. It was a heavy, foul-smelling masquerade she shed before she could have decided what lay underneath by herself. Before she had even understood there was a decision to make.

"It's my thoughts," she says. "They kind of just won't cut the crap and go to bed."

Kaia giggles. It's not quite funny, but then, none of this is, and Claire welcomes the new elation that rises within her at the sound, bubbles of sweet champagne rising in her ribcage. She flies, wrist tied to golden balloons. It is so much better than floating in a puddle of beer in which she drowns her thoughts, but it is volatile and a fall from the sky leaves more injuries than skin drenched in the stench of cheap alcohol, injuries that cannot be washed away with any amount of hot water.

She clears her throat, and Kaia looks at her, eyes wide, pupils big in the dark, so big her entire iris shines black as the ocean. Claire forces herself not to crumble, to linger in painful wholeness for a fractured eternity.

"Race me?" she asks. Her voice is a hoarse echo of imperfection hidden behind walls of glass.

"Where to?"

"Doesn't matter."

Claire's muscles contract, overdue strikes of lightning, and she flies across the stones until she can be certain that at this speed, if she falls, she will stay in trajectory and won't hit the ground. She reaches the escape velocity and for a moment, her legs move on autopilot, her lungs ache with breaths she doesn't take, and her chest is tied with all those worries that are no longer hers. For a moment, her body is forgotten in a motion to consume it while she is ephemeral as a single wave of light.

Kaia touches her shoulder, and Claire comes to a halt that should have shattered the sky into seven billion pieces but doesn't when the touch lingers, and the fingers don't leave her shoulder as she struggles to catch her breath from where it almost escaped, a sheet of scorched paper in the breeze.

Kaia follows. Only when the harsh breathing of the girl beside her twists her lips into a smile does Claire realize that she gambled on something there, with money she doesn't own. She may have lost the race, but she won at her own solitary game. This time, she got luckily. She can't spend the few bucks she has left. This is not a game in which there are loans to take out.

"Not fast enough," Kaia pants. "And you cheated."

"Cheating is what gets you places in life," Claire says, but the words taste like iron on the tip of her tongue.

"There are some things you can't cheat at."

"Like sleep," Claire says. Her muscles still twitch with the strain of their impromptu sprint on uneven ground, but the restlessness has settled back into her bones. It may well be the most stable thing about her.

The vibrant space between them has been compressed into a grain of sand with the power of a nuclear weapon.

They find their way back to the house through the stuffy air. The stones beneath their feet are the only source of noise while they're still on the beach. The lack of words isn't so much a lack as it is a deliberate absence of them. This stretch of spacetime has come saturated. Any word spoken into it and left to tumble around in search of an inherent meaning would find itself an orphan, purpose and necessity so absent they may be considered dead. A little like Claire's Dad. They never held a funeral for him, only a memorial service. There is no casket to the gravestone on the cemetery.

They climb back in through the window. There is no metaphorical value in the way they never lean on each other. Claire has known Kaia for hours, and already, a new whole has been dug to make space for her. Already, Claire's hands are blistered and she will be left with one more pocket of emptiness once she fucks this up.

"Wake me," Claire mumbles as she is already half lost to the promise of sleep, the almost that doesn't feel infinite this Saturday night, as she has gone pliant in the fingers of this capricious creature whose palms hold pillows drenched in dreams, but whose luring draughts of oblivion turn into poison with the swiftness of a dream lost to daylight. "Wake me when you have a nightmare. I promise I don't mind."

"I will," Kaia whispers. The words resound with the vigour of a battalion of promises.

Claire sleeps.

 

〜

 

She wakes up buried alive under dusty mountains of fatigue. There's something warm pressed against her calf, warm and unmoving. She couldn't move if she dared. Sleep covers her eyelashes. It is a sheen of dew and she is a hill in spring, covered in vibrantly green grass. She hasn't felt this refreshed in about three years. There is no trace of even so much an echo of a headache hidden in the meandering corridors behind her temples. A summer storm has passed through, and left her head clear, clear enough to know that this shape next to her, a shape that radiates the harrowing heat of inscrutable familiarity, is Kaia.

Claire blinks. The room is bright, but the sun has already passed its morning dwellings a while ago. No luminous rays find their way through the immaculate surface of her window, which is pointed at the East. It must be late in the day.

Slowly, she separates her calf from Kaia's leg and doesn't think about the skin on skin where the fabric covering the other girl's leg must have ridden up. Her movements are slow, and so is her heartbeat. It allows for a precision she hadn't thought herself capable of anymore until this moment.

The sheets fall apart with the rustle of a melancholy goodbye as she gets up.

Kaia is asleep when she leaves, and so is the house. In the hallway, she can feel the heat of noon seeping in through the door to the garden, never quite airtight, and it revives her sleep-ridden joint. Her footsteps grow louder the closer she gets to the kitchen, the further away she gets from her room, and the sleeping girl inside.

There's a note from Jody in the kitchen, about how she's gone to work - it's Sunday, Claire sighs internally, but she lets the slip of paper be - and about how Alex has a shift, too.

This is something else she cherishes about her new home. Nothing is holy here. Claire doesn't mean to imply that they're all amoral creatures, incapable even of twisted pictures of morality. Rather, there is nothing which holds inherent holiness for the mere fact that its worth has been preached down at the masses for longer than the limited years Pakeha people have existed on this island. There are rules, and there are certain traditions, unspoken and spoken, which no-one breaks if not for an emergency. They do try to all have dinner together at least once a week. They do not simply coexist in this space. When they come together, it feels voluntary, and like something Claire is allowed to enjoy.

She decides to make cheese toasties. The sun is just short of strong enough to meld the cheese by itself.  
Her skin dampens in the heat although she moves languidly.

She steps outside with her plate, and tilts her neck up. The red tiles under her feet have almost soaked up enough warmth to hurt. The sky is blue and free of blemishes. She can't spot the tiniest cloud, and the blue looks boisterous in its unbroken vibrancy. She doesn't wish for clouds, although the heat starts to grow corporeal at this time of the day. No amount of agitated water molecules in the atmosphere could bring as much shade as the Earth itself when it spins for this half of the planet to be submerged in darkness again.

The air stands still again. Even the wind only dares to move when the sun has moved on in its merciless reign.

The universe has pressed pause on the storm that is Kaia, too.

They barely talk all day. It's too much effort, in a way. Claire blushes deeper than her sunburn every time Kaia smiles at her. She is tempted to forgo the sunscreen, just so she will have an excuse for her splotchy skin, but then remembers that skin cancer is a thing and begrudgingly reaches for the sticky bottle.

She goes to the beach with Lennox and Hohepa when Jody gets home in the early afternoon and proposes to take Kaia into town to get her a new mobile plan and some school supplies, mainly a new uniform. Claire doesn't want to scour the Warehouse a skirt and a shirt with a fake tie. Her old clothing is still collecting dust in her beside table, and it is perfectly fine. She has barely grown in two years, and won't grow anymore. If she had ever been supposed to, she is fairly sure that by now, she managed to stunt the growth she was promised by her genes with the less than ideal substances she consumes too much of.

The start of term is in nine days. That means nine days of freedom, and she desires to keep this limited amount of time untainted by the thought of suffering yet to come.

Claire skates along the walkway by Marine Parade with Hohepa and Lennox. She pushes so hard that her leg starts to hurt, and her sole to scrape across the pavement when she only touches her foot to the ground. Sweat runs down the back of her neck where she has tied her hair up in a messy ponytail.

She makes the air move by breaking through.

By the time she gets home, she's toeing the line of late for dinner and she reeks of sweat. She's had three beers, if she subtracts the amount Hohepa stole from the cans that she ended up squashing. The air stands still again. Her breaths still come in pants when she kicks off her shoes before she steps on the carpet in the living room. It barely makes a difference, for her soles of her feet are just as dirty.

Jody goes to hug her and then sighs when her hands touch Claire's back. She's drenched in sweat.

"At least I know you hurried home," she says with an amiable smile. "Go shower! Dinner will be ready in five."

"I try," Claire mumbles and slides past her. She does not try so much as she obeys for the simplicity of a safe framework that comes with these rules. Most of the time, it feels more like they have been gifted to her rather than imposed on her. She does not try so much to follow them as she tries to feel grateful for what she's got. Over her shoulder, already half gone from Jody's view, she shouts: "Smells good!"

Her fingers slide to the hem of her shirt to take it off. She walks blindly into the relative dark of the hallway. Spots of sunlight dance a private show for her in the black.

She collides with Kaia. Their bodies meet and separate in the span of a single breath, two erratic heartbeats. Claire's ease vanishes along with the laziness her blood has soaked up throughout the day, the lackadaisical sunlight that happens to fall upon the Earth, happens to bring and destroy life; she startles.

"Oops." She croaks out the sound through a white beach of sand at the back of her throat. The grains stick to the mucous membrane on the inside of her mouth first, drying it out, and then covers every bit of skin still dampened by sweat until she is rough sandpaper, ready to destroy. She needs to wash this treacherous weapon off before it grows into a sandstorm by the name of uncertainty. "Sorry."

"That's okay," Kaia says.

"See you in a minute," Claire says, unnecessarily, more garbled words, more sand to rub any decency off her skin plagued by the sun. She is aware of the silence that follows, aware of the way Kaia knows when to speak and when words are but unwanted children the atmospherical orphanages no longer have beds and nourishment for. Her steps feel uncoordinated as she walks on although their rhythm stays the same.

It takes hours for them to be in bed. Hours of mindless scrolling on cracked phone screens, of listening to half a song with half her mind because one of her earbuds still isn't working; they are hours of conversation that drips off armchairs and the sofa like honey, and hours of watching people run around on TV while no-one moves except to get lemonade from the fridge. They are Sunday night hours. Claire relishes the slow pace of them. The blood in her arteries is honey, a glutinous golden liquid. Her muscles are warm as if she were using them. It feels okay lie reclined in an armchair, bare foot approximately twenty centimetres from Kaia's, and not do anything.

Her neurons work in energy-conserving mode, and the threshold level has been heightened for stimuli to go through. Everything softens in the face of this. Lines blur, and harsh letters imprinted on the membranes in her body become pencil lines sketched with a light hand.  
She doesn't wait for sleep. She ambles along towards it. Sleep waits for her.

The illusion shatters once they are in bed, and sleep is not there when her body breaks into a run towards it, limbs heavy with agitation, mind spinning in vaguely circular shapes. Sleep has not waited for her, she thinks, but is fast to amend. Sleep never had been waiting for her.

Her eye catches on a single star in the tiny bit of night sky the closed window allows for her to see. Before it became known that the sun is but a star amongst an infinite number of her kind, not a solitary flame that drowns in the ocean every time it grows a fiery hue, the night was an overflowing well for stories of all kinds, the whispered, the shouted and those never told. Claire looks at the star, and imagines it to be not a complete sun too far away for her human eyes to know, but to be a luminous speck of the sun that no longer shines. She looks at the star, and imagines a sun torn to pieces at dusk, reassembled at dawn, by the hands of a ghostly universe. She looks at the star, and she understands the true meaning of something shattered that burned terribly bright.

"Are you sleeping?" Kaia's hushed voice freezes her hands before she can work to tear herself apart, only to exist amongst the scattered stars. It is a fool's work, but she won't deny that a fool is what she might be at her core. A fool is hyper aware of Kaia's every motion. A fool turns around to look at her.

"No," Claire whispers.

Kaia's eyes are wide and dark and devoid of any clues as to what she is thinking, what she is feeling, what she is, period. They are ponds so dark they soak Claire up in them. She sees only herself mirrored in them. It is not enough. She has the urge to dive into inky blackness, not knowing what she may find, what stories may be written in this ink. The darkness in there must be more absorbant of light than vantablack. Claire cannot find an entrance to wheedle herself in just by staring.

"Can you skateboard?" It's a question asked on impulse, but each stumble brings her closer to Kaia. She's unsure if she is already close enough to shatter something if she falls; if she is, which of them will fall apart?

Kaia shakes her head softly. A strand of hair tumbles down to cover part of her eye.

Claire blinks.

"I'll teach you," she proposes.

And she does. The night is raw, the sky a dome of coals waiting to burn above them. Sparks flicker between them, flames that will eventually ignite the treacherous roof, but the universe takes its time. They won't live to see the black coals scorched white. Humanity won't live to see the night sky break apart.

They steal a flashlight from one of the five emergency kits Jody has, the one that is tucked away safely in the bathroom cupboard, and climb out of the window. Every breath Claire takes threatens to burn the roof of her mouth. The heat the day left behind, agitated air bound in its place, burns bright in combination with the intoxicating adrenaline that shoots through every one of Claire's cells as though all axons were highways when they are not. It exceeds the speed limit with them when they sprint across Main North Road although a car passes about once every five minutes. They could take a leisurely walk right there.

Leisure is overrated. There is only so frail a border between the enjoyment of nothing in the calendar, and lethargy, apathy.

They sprint until their lungs ache, until their muscles burn right through to their bones. Until every inflammable part of their human bodies burns in a fire caused by oxygen instead of gasoline.

Trouble takes Claire's hand to lead her. Deceit coats its fingers in a steady illusion of warmth.

No streetlights illuminate the stretch of asphalt Claire deems appropriate for their purposes. The village this street leads to is kilometres back towards the inland. The parking space for visitors to the walkways around a solitary hill that overlooks Hawkes' Bay is just visible with its single nightlight that colours their peripheral vision in a dirty yellow hue. Other than that, there are stars upon stars upon stars in the sky.

"Do you know any constellations?" Claire asks once her breath has caught up to her from where she left it just behind the road they flew to cross.

"Except the Southern Cross?" Kaia shakes her head. "Just a big mess to me up there."

"Same."

There is a ditch beside the street in which water flows, or rather stands, in winter and in spring. It lies dry now, in uncanny resemblance to the conversation they don't manage to hold. There are no hi-vis waistcoats to put on words so that they won't get lost in all this space between them, and left alone with no red string to hold them together they tumble into the ditch and seep into the Earth that begs for any nourishment, poisonous as it may be.

Claire turns the flashlight on. Its weak light bulb extinguishes the smaller stars. Darkness never does suffocate light. Only light itself may.  
She lets the domesticated star dance in her hand so that the cone of light sweeps across the asphalt. The skateboard lands with a soft thump. Kaia startles, guard up to the last curl gone rogue.

"Easy," Claire mutters.

Kaia draws her luminous guard up so far Claire fears she will drown in it, and never resurface. About a year ago, she made a promise to herself that no-one else would drown on her watch. She doesn't know which way to swim for the shore, but what she can do is hold on to Kaia until they are both out of breath, and out of strength.

She pushes the skateboard towards Kaia.

"So, get on there," she says. "Don't worry. It's easy as once you got the hang of it."

It seems ridiculous in hindsight, another fool's fault, not to realize how literally she has to hold on to Kaia to teach her this. She remembers the summer Mal taught her, or rather the few days they stumbled around, and then the weeks they cruised through the city together, up on the hill, down the streets where a car could have rounded the corner a billion times. In one summer, she created a billion of alternate threads of universe in which she is dead. But then, in one day, the universe's ghostly hands weave more strings than human numbers can express, more than a human mind can comprehend in any other fashion than the incomprehensible behind the door that says 'beyond', unmistakably there but without a knob to open it, without a lock to pick.

"Hold on to my hands," she offers.

Kaia accepts the offer with wide-eyed grace. Her glance fixates on Claire's face for a fraction of a second, but summer with its few remaining bees has warped time into honey. A fraction of a second is long enough for Claire to feel heat creep up in her cheeks. There is no sunlight, no light skin and subsequent sunburn to blame it on this time. She points the flashlight at a crowd of innocent, crippled bystanders, withered leaves of grass in the distance that glow yellow in their dying days, before she sets it down, and plunges herself and Kaia into dark. They can just barely make out the ditch, now. The hills at the horizon loom in anonymity. Claire can't remember having ever felt as present in the moment as she does now. Her cheeks are splotchy behind a veil of dark. Kaia's eyes still shine.

Their fingers intertwine, long-lost puzzle pieces in the hands of a grown-up child come back to their parents' house only to find their former toys, and relish in the memory of them although the puzzle is easy with its forty-nine pieces and its edges are worn.

Claire's diffuse memory doesn't take her back to Mal, not this time. She's glad of it before she realises why the positioning of their hands wears an odd familiarity, a coat she knows but cannot, in her barely composed state of eager breathlessness, recognize immediately.

One of her teachers at Sacred Heart, a woman of about sixty back then, used to be adamant about the art of ballroom dancing. Claire isn't quite sure which class the woman had been supposed to teach. Her interest in academics was rapidly tumbling down the front steps of the ancient school building. The teacher used to have her students line up, nice and proper with tucked-in uniforms and skirts never shorter than the dress code allowed, and have them dance. Claire remembers nothing of the actual dancing.

She spins Kaia, with her feet planted on the skateboard, around her in a circle on impulse. The girl's hold on to her hands grows fierce. The image of ballroom dancing in an old gymnasium, amidst the stench of rotten cheese and the squeaks of tennis shoes on the worn linoleum floor, evanesces from Claire's mind. It is worth the tense second they both work to regain Kaia's balance.

"You're a menace, Claire Novak," she says.

"I know," Claire replies. "My language is fucking trouble."

Kaia giggles.

"Now teach me properly," she demands. Her eyes dart back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, gaging Claire's reaction before her slow brain can compute the words. Claire squeezes her hands. The reassurance is passed through hollowed-out fingers, tainted in the ink spilled that could not write a helpful message to Kaia anyways. The white-hot instinct flares to life again, searing Claire's insides. But Kaia knows best how to protect herself. She is a wild animal, she is prey, and she knows how to run. It is written in her alert stance, written in the flicker of her eyes. Claire's language is trouble, and she just begins to make sense of the one Kaia is written in, to stumble upon the first few vocabulary words.

Claire spends three nights teaching Kaia properly, and hoarding improper thoughts as though they were gold instead of a heavy, leaden treasure. She sleeps more than she remembers being possible. She sleeps better. And although they spend hours of darkness in those short summer nights each night outside, on a deserted stretch of asphalt that leads only to the hills, not to the stars, the shadows under Kaia's eyes wash out a little more each day, too.

 

〜

 

Days pass with a languid ease. Every morning, Claire wakes up first, and every morning, Claire wakes up to some part of her body, some stray limb or another, touching Kaia. It is as innocent as it gets, but the warmth seeps into Claire's skin wherever the point of contact is with an intensity that makes the sun grow pale. Innocence melts in summer. She still goes to the beach with her friends. Most of the time, they go somewhere deemed safe to swim. She comes back with her hair in tangles and dried traces of salt on her skin. Kaia expresses no desire to join them. She wears long sleeves in temperatures that call for a nudist culture.

They haven't progressed to days yet, haven't progressed to conversation or skating under a reassembled sun so close by.  
Wednesday night, the restlessness tears at Claire with the gravitational force of a neutron star. Her neurons fire off empty signals as she itches for something to course through her body, something for which she has no pill. Recklessness. Adrenaline. The entire universe.

She is a little electronic device, and her currents long to be plugged into the universe again.

They climb out of the window once the world is asleep around them and only the rogue ones still lie awake.

Claire grabs her skateboard, and then reaches for Alex's which the girl used about five times, back before she went seventy percent responsible adult and thirty percent grandmother, two things well known not to be the same. She presses it into Kaia's hands.

"Ready for a new adventure?" Claire whispers.

"Sure." Kaia's apprehension bleeds through her voice at first. Claire nudges her.

"Nothing dangerous," she promises, and adds, although she knows it might be a step on the line if not over it: "You get keep your long shirts and stuff on."

"Well then," Kaia mutters. Her sarcasm doesn't hide the smile well visible in the blueish glow of the porch lights.   
It is half a miracle how Claire's cheeks no longer hurt when she smiles. She's willing to accept this gift from the universe. She's not willing to accept the scientists crap about endorphins and smiles that cause happiness. The only smile that causes her happiness is one on the face of a person important to her. On Jody's face, for example, but the woman smiles so often that were Claire happy for every smile, she'd probably be at mormon levels of cheer. On Kaia's face.

"We're going to school," Claire explains. She grins at the utter confusion distorting Kaia's face. "Follow me."

"School?"

"Fuck, yeah."

"Don't we have to be there early enough?"

"But see," Claire says as she steps onto the street and lets her skateboard drop to the asphalt below. Kaia follows suit, although it is evident by the furrow of her eyebrows and the crease which her forehead forms that she is not convinced by the idea. "It won't be fun then. And now let's go. We have quite a bit of ground to cover here."

Kaia gives her a sceptical look.

"Please," Claire adds. "I want to go."

"I'll go with you, then."

A part of her wants to brag, or carry a flamboyant flag with Kaia on it, Kaia, who must trust her, because she follows with no further question despite the idea being at half the distance to insanity. It is not all the way there, which. Claire sometimes thinks would be easy from where she stands. A two day trip of tramping, at most, in easy terrain and agreeable weather conditions. Another part is quietly satisfied, drawing up its future silently as a diligent school child, and it will sit in its corner for a long time.

Claire lets out a raucous laugh as they skate along the walkway. The sea gleams black to their left, and the sky rests above them in the darkest hue of blue the human mind can conceive. The stars sing a cheeky song of glee that Claire feels the need to join in, but the lyrics are in a foreign tongue her own tongue is not capable of, and the melody rings in a range and harmony beyond her capacities. Still, she hums along, a melody in a song which forbids dissonance.

The air sleeps under thick blankets with a myriad folds to hide and lose oneself in; it glows with heat long after the sun has moved to delight and frighten people on the other side of this planet, or rather long after the planet has moved to make sure everyone is treated somewhat equally in the distribution of vitamin D. Sweat gathers on Claire's back. She only moves faster.

Her eyes cannot catch up with her own speed.

Nature falls behind for a fraction of a heartbeat. Reality shifts. The picture is one no words have been invented for so far, a picture which has not been annexed into the Empire whose Emperor is the expression of reality. It fades in Claire's brain before she can attempt to process. There is nothing to process which her neurons could recognize and translate into chemistry and electricity.

Next to her, Kaia now laughs, too.

Town holds its breath when they pass through. They suck the air out of it with their recklessness as they shoot through the streets where cars could come by. The traffic lights are turned off at this time of the night, and the dark envelops them again and again, and veils the world around them until they are gloriously alone. The world's highest mountain sinks to sea level for them, so that they may sit on its summit and breathe thin air.

The signals Claire's neurons fire off are no longer empty.

By the time they reach the school, they are giddy, drunk on liquor stolen from the breath of dying gods. It lies unwelcoming, here, somewhere in the suburbs of a town which consists of barely anything other than suburbs, and the hill they feel no desire to climb this Wednesday night. The buildings are crouched low. Empty windows shoot them hostile glares. Or maybe that is just Claire.

Fact is, they are somewhere they aren't supposed to be, and the possibility of trouble courses through her veins to satisfy the addict's craving that has been leaving her restless. At one point, this addiction is going to end up as deadly as one to heroin, she thinks, but then she thinks about how the withdrawal is already not as harsh every time anymore. For now, she is high.

"So what are we doing here now?" Kaia asks. "Despite trespassing."

"We are breaking and entering," Claire replies with a mischievous smirk. She almost makes a fatal mistake when her fingers linger in the air for a breathless second, about to intertwine with Kaia's. She steps forward instead, fishes her lockpicks out of her pocket.

Superfluous rules teach those who suffer under their restrictions one, exactly one thing: how to break them.

"What?"

"We," Claire repeats, "are breaking and entering. No-one should deny us an education. Come on, the library is to the back."

She has already broken into the library once, albeit in daylight, to get Caera out of there a detention, and she knows the building is poorly guarded against even an amateur lockpick. There is nothing to steal but books and old fashioned computers, and, in any case, they didn't come here to steal anything except the preposterous dominance this building exudes on those students with whom the school is reluctant to agree, steal the fear which a mere five or six buildings in various states of decay or modernity inject into student's brains, and bury it under masses of vivacious black water.

They've come to crown themselves so that they won't slip and fall into dirt once they get here next Tuesday.

Claire thinks she has come for the mere thrill.

Kaia has come for Claire.

The window gives way to them easily, and the badly tended to nightlight which decorates the obnoxiously white wall of the English building that faces the library is the only one watching as to lean shadows slip through the space where there was a barrier of glass just seconds earlier. It watches, and as its light fades off their backs, it forgets.

"Here we are," Claire says. "Make yourself familiar."

She has not thought about the fact that breaking into the library requires for them to be inside. The stars are still there, scattered above them sharp like shards of glass, but they aren't mirrors to the state of them any more, mirrors to create fragments by themselves which can be pierced together in seven myriads of ways, and there is something tender about this inside space that she is suddenly afraid will be cut by their shards of glass. Does the atmosphere ever bleed when it is not dripping with sanguine clouds at dusk?

She stays close by the window while Kaia gravitates towards the center of the room, and tries to ignore how she herself is pulled towards shelves of books that have lost their magic in her foolish war against all that was. It is, she realized afterwards when the taste of stale success tainted all she ate, all she saw and smelt and felt, easy to win a war of this peculiar and yet perfectly ordinary kind. How would a limited, battered battalion of the past succeed against the infinite invisible army of the present? It is a war which drains the resources of the land which it is fought on, but otherwise only does wake the petrified to kill them dead.

To obliterate one's roots if they have not yet a fully rotten core leads to an anti-climactic victory of pretty blossoms doomed to die if they do not manage to grow healthy roots in time. It is possible, but difficult. Humans tend to underestimate the nutritional value of memories to the brain. Memories feel better blurry, but it doesn't do to build on a crumbly foundation.

Claire hurries after Kaia. Her footsteps echo around the dusty room, an elephant's mass of insecurity which weighs down on her in an attempt to sink her into the ground. It is too solid for her to disappear, neither a dark fallen sky nor an ocean for her body to get lost in. She strides forward and lets the echo roll over her as thunder would during a stormy night.

"Find any book you like?" she asks. Her breath cuts short in her throat where she works to take the burden of, brick by brick. It is tedious manual labour. Flakes of solid stone float into her streaming blood. She reaches for a random book, flicks to a random page, points her flashlight at it and lets random words struggle to find passage into her brain.

Kaia shrugs. Her own flashlight illuminates a miraculous display of the art of dancing which the dust in this room has mastered.

"Sure. I didn't peg you as the reading type."

Claire is determined to make this work, even though she struggles with the simplest words, and each step tires her muscles with the debilitating force of five hours spent hiking in hostile terrain. The darkness still sits with them, although it has ceased to be corporeal now that they aren't in the company of a sky full of stars, but in that of a room cluttered with shelves, books, dust, pamphlets for every imaginable thing and bean bags. It has ceased to be the companion they needed to be by themselves. It is harder by themselves, surrounded only by the inanimate.

Trouble looms over them as a giant, ghostly bat, but trouble is not what Claire wants the fabric that connects them to be made of.

"I'm not," she concedes, and puts the book back on its shelf. "Are you?"

"I like poetry," Kaia says. "Not into fantasy, or romance, but thrillers are cool."

"Oh," Claire says. She shifts. "Cool."

Kaia smiles.

All words fail. All thoughts fail. It is not Claire's heart only that skips a beat, although, undeniably and irrevocably it does, for her life to now be not a second, merely a heartbeat shorter. It is the universe that, for a moment, halts, and then accelerates to a speed which goes beyond existence, non-existence, and maybe-existence, too. Claire is not the one doing the protecting here. On the contrary. She is the one doing the endangering. All white-hot flashes fail to shock her brain into caution.

"I think poetry is everywhere in life though. The harsher, the more real, the more raw and poetic," Kaia says, as though nothing has failed. "Until you numb it out with drugs that is."

She speaks as though there are still atoms from which the notion of fine can be build.

She speaks as though her fast fingers can put the universe back together.

She laughs as though her own strength is not something she can perceive.

All of this is true, Claire knows. Truth aches deeply, and this one, she feels at the core of her bones while her shell, easy to damage as it is, stays intact. The superficial truths, or as they may be called, convenient lies, tend to skin her.

"Life can kind of suck."

"True." Kaia's eyes are wide, alert, and directed at Claire. Dark as they are, they are headlights she can barely bare to stare straight into.

"It doesn't suck right now, though."

"It doesn't."

"Should we go?" Claire asks. 

"It's a little depressing, being here."

"It'll be worse during the day," she mumbles. Her heart palpitates a rhythm to words her brain pounds out over a rattling keyboard. The keys are stained white with a trouble that has revealed it's true blinding face; a trouble that can no longer promise adventure and secrets of the world where there are none concealed by the ideal society of brutal honesty. The words are blunt blades.

"Yeah." Kaia pauses. "But you'll be there."

"And so will you," Claire says. It feels as insufficient as the amount of oxygen left in this air she has robbed to cover for her extensive needs. She leaves it to inflate in empty space and adopt its dangerous meaning before she can taint it with fearful dishonesty.

"It won't be a nightmare," Kaia says. She switches her flashlight off. On again. Off. Claire waits. "I know, because I haven't had a single one of the bad ones since I came to stay with you. It'll be an uncomfortable nuisance, at best."

It is when Kaia talks that Claire's internal chorus wells up, delighted by the stage it’s been so involuntarily given, and so rightly, too. Not enough, not enough, not enough. Her anger is a tamed lion.

"I've been sleeping," she blurts. "It's a win-win situation."

Kaia switches her flashlight back on in time for her to catch the way the girl's hands twitch.

"Let's go, then," she says. Trouble spreads its wings. "Jody is the obviously the best, but we better be home before sunrise nevertheless."

By the time they get home, distinctly sweaty but cooled from the languid last few minutes just before the first hint of the sun messes with the uniform colour of the night sky, Claire is tired. Her body is cleansed of restlessness, bones heavy, heart rate slow and steady. It feels better than any buzz or any haze beer and harder liquor were ever able to create within her. When she slows down her brain artificially until it focuses on nothing at all, there are galaxies of things to be seen, and none she sees. Now, there is a benevolent void which waits only for her.

Kaia's smile ignites her fire, and burnt out, she sleeps on a bed of soft ashes. These coals will replenish themselves within a few hours of uncompromising rest. She has slept on embers for too long.

Trust sleeps between the two girls in their shared bed. It wears a blindfold of infatuation intertwined with want of belonging, a fabric prone to tearing as it is prone to strain, and both threads cancel each other out. The usefulness of blind trust is constrained to safety, and its longevity is constrained to a summer during which no-one and nothing ages anyways. They are working, though, working to take this blindfold off and weave the indestructible fabric into something new.

 

〜

 

The work they find themselves with would look tedious to any outsider. The material of the blindfold is sensitive to sunlight, sensitive to any light, and yet can only be worked on with sufficient efficiency during the day, when the sun burns down on them a little harsher with each day of fading summer, as though the atmosphere has looked on their ambling and decided not to shield them from the bleaching quality of the sun.

The work requires words to be spoken, and glances to be shared until the not every conspiratorial smile has the power to move the universe anymore, and until conspiracy, a secret connection never quite subjected to a test of its proof, becomes an agreement between them. It lingers on the verge of unspoken and spoken. They fill a novel with words not worth noting. There are so many of them, and the only way they make a meaningful picture is to mash them together, not as particles of ink but as particles of paint, and to fill a canvas with them so that no individual may be recognized. No critic would endeavour to regard a painting under a microscope.

Claire spends her days with Kaia now, although they never do much more than lounge around in the garden; Jody, sometimes, asks them to come food shopping with her, and then takes them out for an ice cream to make up for the effort. Claire does get a new school uniform, after all. Hers is new, she has worn it for the two months she attempted at William Colenso before she gave up completely. William Colenso had been halfway to giving up. Was this halfway up again, or another halfway down?

Emily calls and asks if she is grounded. She tells her no.

Leilani and Brandon send a thousand snaps of their weed, their beer and their parties. They must notice she doesn’t reply, but they know that school is set to start soon, and they don’t bother her about it.

Other friends send messages, and snaps.

Claire spends her days with Kaia.

If they go out at night, they do not venture further than the stretch of beach right by the house. One night, they walk on the train tracks until their limbs have grown tired and their minds melded so thoroughly all conversation is rendered superfluous, although by its mellifluous charms it floats with them right until they pass the gate, and Jody's window is too near for them to make any distinctly human noise.

Claire smiles more than she remembers ever smiling.

It becomes trouble in new, mildly terrifying ways, when they run into Castiel and Dean in town and she smiles at them. Castiel looks like a puppy. There are some things which she has no desire to understand, and her parents' life, including the decay of it, is one of them. She never quite saw how this socially inept and yet astonishingly powerful man who owns a stupendous amount of businesses and, by association, people in Napier, could have intercepted with a marriage as perfectly imperfect as her parents' was. They bickered enough not to get bored with each other; and their bickering was unnecessary enough for them not to delve into a more fundamental nature of argument.

It becomes trouble when Jody hugs her more, and Alex silently makes coffee for the both of them one morning when she has a late shift, and they get up at about the same time.

It becomes trouble when Kaia is not a foreign familiar, an intimate stranger anymore. It becomes trouble when she is no longer another galaxy that collides with Claire and sets her universe right, but when they melt to form a single, massive galaxy.

Their black holes dance around each other in a deathly dance of dervishes that could lead to all, nothing, or something entirely different from the spectrum these to open to the human mind.

The restlessness strikes towards the rubber band end of Monday afternoon. Term starts on Tuesday. Confinement, the inevitable sentence that is in the best interest of this vague part of them somewhere buried, this future they are supposed to cherish, another invisible god to admire, is hours away. They are lounging in the garden. With each wordless hour passing, the tension in the air rises until drowning levels are reached, and the remainder of tension between them, these little specks of fabric that still cling to trust's half-opened eyes, is submerged in the acidic solution which solves nothing at all. With each wordless hour passing, the frequency at which they glance at each other, at which they stare until the other looks and they can pretend that even at this point, it is fate, and not them meddling with it out of sheer wanton desire. They rarely look at the same time, but they have synchronised the instance at which they will look away.

"Let's go somewhere," Claire says. Her tongue moves idly. It drops the words with an indifference her brain cannot muster, a necessary indifference to douse the fire in her with water straight from the depths of the Pacific.

"Sure." Kaia stretches beside her.

Claire rushes to get up before she can finish to think about the way she wants to tear the fabric back that hides Kaia's skin from her at all times. She ignores the way her head spins, and her body sways soberly as she moves towards the house. She ignores her temporary blindness in the sudden dark.

Kaia follows.

"Where to?" she asks, now, after she has already agreed to come.

Claire steps out of the sliding door before she answers, and slips her dusty shoes on. The laces have already torn twice this summer, and the knots she fixed them with are sloppy. Her skateboard lies in its usual spot, black wheels warm from the waves of heat they have soaked up. She waits for Kaia to follow her, and points up to a yellow shape in the distance, blurry in the warm air.

"That hill," she says. "We'll see the entire bay. We can stay until sunset."

They've come this way three times, come to skate on the stretch of asphalt that leads towards the hill three nights in a row, but it is not merely a different time of the day, it is a different street for different girls to walk on. They are electrifyingly close although there is a small car's width of space to either side of them. Claire soaks up as much of the dry air as she can. It accommodates them as they speed past it. Some particles cling onto them; others waves as they pass by. Their wheels rumble on the asphalt.

Thistles grow along the path to the top of the hill, next to it, on it, everywhere. They stretch their sharp thorns towards the bare skin of Claire's legs and towards Kaia's swaying pants, working to tear at them. It takes up all of their attention to dodge the grasping plants, and to climb the last few metres, where the soft curve becomes a steep ascend. At the top of the hill, they find a spot free of thistles, still working together silently. It is a narrow shape of flattened, withered grass, not quite round, but with a manifold of edges so thoroughly softened that a circle best describes it. They sit, sides aligned, and they can justify this to each other because otherwise, they would sit aligned with thistles, and those would not seep into their sides warm as boiling honey, but pierce them to let this sweet essence drip out.

Claire knows there is no justification necessary but the fact that this is what she wants, not to her, but this is a closeness only practised safely in the dark blue folds of the night, and the sun, although on a sinking path, still stings Claire's reddened skin.

She looks at Kaia to find the girl's dark eyes already fixed on her, soaked in the syrup of sweet expectation. It is champagne syrup, condensed intoxication that seeps right through Claire's blood into every single one of her cells.

It is easy, in the end.

This end is not truly an end so much as it is a beginning that wears a child's mask of finality.

It is easy as the first beginning was, easy as the first moment Claire now feels again, with the same cool traces of sweat on her back and the same anticipation coursing through her neurons, a billion of impulses dispatched each fraction of a second that never collide in their perfect dance. It is as easy as the first handshake, as easy as a universe falling into place. It is as easy as belonging.

Claire leans forward, black holes collide, and their lips belong with firm and fervid ease.

"Is this okay?" she asks, quietly, and her hand that has found its way to the back of Kaia's neck stills in its soft caresses.

"More than okay," Kaia mutters, and leans forward again.

Claire's softly uttered 'fuck' is drowned in their kiss.

They kiss until the sky is lit by the tail of fire of the star it treats as a domestic animal but to which it is no more than a little rock. They kiss until their bodies are tangled in each other like salty strands of damp hair, kiss until they are one galaxy but each a myriad of single stars on their own, and as complete together as they are apart.

The universe rattles into place, finds the lost slots it had forgotten, and then it doesn't budge anymore.

"Ready for what comes next?" Claire whispers into the fiery space between them once they finally drift apart.

"Yes," Kaia whispers. "You?"

"Yes."

 

〜

 

Kaia sleeps in shorts and a t-shirt that night. It is more monumental than any kiss could have been. A kiss is merely yet another kind of word. Closely intertwined and shorts and shirts the trust that sleeps between them finally regains its eyesight.

Claire's language is still trouble. But she's learned others, now, too. There is a language of love, which draws its words and grammar from the stars, and she thinks she might have found the dictionary which translates this enigmatic tongue.

She holds Kaia tighter, and knows.

 

〜

 

And the wave breaks, but the water's journey carries on.


End file.
